"That I was sick and wandering and delirious," she interrupted. "How rumor exaggerates. I felt a little giddy and sat down to rest with a cup of tisane. You would like some?" She ordered without waiting for his answer. The technician had been right, the glucose had given her strength, and Gustav looked as if he could use a little. Had he, too, been the victim of dreams?
"You left your bed too soon, my dear," he said. "And will try to do too much too quickly. If the Matriarch cannot set an example of intelligent behavior then who can?"
"Don't nag. Gustav. I wanted to see Iduna." She read the question in his face. "I hoped there would be a change," she explained. "It's been so long now since Dumarest went after her and still we wait."
As they had waited for years and it hadn't really been all that long since the man had entered the Tau. Not really long-but, dear God, long enough!
She heard the thin ringing and looked down and realized the cup in her hand was rattling against the saucer. A sure betrayal of the trembling of her hand which in turn was a betrayal of her over-strained nerves. The waiting. Always the waiting and, already, she was sure there could be no hope. Dumarest would follow the others into insanity and death. A condemned slave who had gambled and lost-what did it matter how they treated his body?
Gustav looked at her as she rose. "Kathryn?"
"Something Tamiras mentioned," she said. "Electronic stimulation of muscle and sinew. If we use electroshock therapy on Dumarest the impact might produce an interesting reaction."
"No." Rising, he caught her arm, talking as he followed her from the room. "Kathryn, you can't. The man is at our mercy. To sear his brain with current-no! No, I won't allow it!"
"You won't allow it?" You? For a moment her eyes held him and he was reminded that she was the Matriarch and he a lower form of life. "Your wishes have nothing to do with it. My orders will be obeyed. We have waited too long as it is."
"And his brain? You could destroy it with what you intend."
"A chance he must take."
"And our word? Your word as Matriarch?"
"Dumarest is a slave who merited death. He was offered a chance to redeem himself. As yet he has failed to do that. I have beeen patient long enough." Too long and now patience was over. Why didn't Gustav understand? "He is expendable," she reminded. "If he should die what have we to lose?"
He looked odd lying on the bed. An appararent contradiction as a wild creature looked out of place when held in a cage. Standing, watching the technicians as they fussed about their business, Kathryn studied the hard lines of the face, the mouth, the jaw. The face which had looked so bleak and the mouth so cruel when he had held her at his mercy. An animal fighting to survive-could she blame him for that? And could he blame her for having the same attributes as himself? She was a mother fighting for her child and if she had to kill for Iduna's sake then she would not hesitate.
"All ready, my lady." A technician straightened from where she had been applying electrodes to Dumarest's skull. Others snaked from his torso, stomach and groin, a mesh of wire set to monitor his every physical and mental reaction. To one side a machine waited, a battery of pens hovering over an endless roll of paper, and panels studded with dials and telltales added to the laboratory-like appearance, of the room. "I suggest we commence with a short burst of high-level current applied directly to the thalamic area."
"Wait!"
"You have another suggestion?" She had denigrated her consort and regretted it. Now Kathryn wished to make amends. "Gustav?"
"Just wait," he begged. "Make more tests on minor physical stimuli. Try hypnotic therapy. Try drugs-but don't rush to burn his brain."
The technician was affronted. She said, stiffly, "We are not ignorant savages and neither are we sadistic torturers. Stimulus applied to the area I have specified has resulted in beneficial results in a great majority of cases of personality maladjustment."
"A great majority," said Gustav. "And the others? Cabbages? Mindless idiots who would be better dead? Can you honestly claim to know exactly what you are doing?" He turned to Kathryn as she made no answer. "At least the woman is honest. She would be more so if she admitted that her treatment was like throwing a jigsaw up into the air. It sometimes could fall into a new and pleasing shape but more often it lands as a jumble."
"You're wasting time, Gustav."
"We have time. A day, a week, a year even, what does it matter? Dumarest is surviving which is more than the others did. By this time they were idiots, already dying, some even already dead. He could have found Iduna and be leading her back to us. Kathryn-dare you risk our daughter for the sake of a little more delay?"
A good argument and she pondered it, looking at the wire-wreathed man on the bed. A dedicated servant fighting on her behalf or a self-seeking mercenary only out for what he could get? Neither, she decided, but a man who was doing what had to be done.
"My lady?" The technicians were waiting. Kathryn looked at her hands, the knuckles, the gleam of the polished nails. "Shall we begin?"
"An hour," said Kathryn. "We'll give him an hour."
The defenses were yielding and soon the battle would be over. In the flare of rolling explosions the castle glittered like a solid gem, turrets and spires limned in flame, the triple arch a fading challenge flung against the sky. Shadows clustered over the meadow and in the gloom things raced and rustled and reared with vibrant clickings. Other shapes of nightmare met them, struggles culminating in dissolution, new menaces rising from the ashes of the old. The air quivered with the pulse and throb of war.
A war of fantasy which Dumarest directed from the summit of a mountain, hurling shafts and javelins of destruction against Iduna and her host, sending the figments of his imagination to stalk the terrors created by hers.
It had escalated from small beginnings; troops of armed and armored men riding, charging, falling to rise again. To be stiffened with the sinews of modern destruction which he knew all too well; the mercenary bands in which he had served providing the template for new armies more savage and vicious than those born from romantic imagery. Then they, in turn, yielded to images of delirium; horrors such as he had first experienced in the Tau, the product of buried fears and whispered fantasies; men with triple heads and spined hides, birds like lizards, dragons spouting fire, spiders which dropped from the clouds and stung like scorpions.
War which waged with unremitting fury and turned the area into a cratered and fuming waste in which the castle alone stood untouched and shining with an inner, lambent glow.
Dumarest hurtled toward it at a thought.
"Iduna! Will you yield?"
Serpents lanced toward him where he stood facing the arched doorway now blocked by the upraised drawbridge. They darted from the battlements, writhing streamers of flame which seared and hissed and fell to the foot of the hemisphere of protection he maintained about his person. From the soil darted things with many legs which scrabbled and reared to fall in puffs of ash and his guardians blasted them.
Things of the mind-when all else had been tried what more terrible than the creatures of childish terrors?
"Iduna! Yield!"
"No!" She stood on the highest battlement and her hair was a pennon of midnight glory. "Earl, I won't let you win!"
A game-always to her everything was a game and she was right. What else could life be but a game with death as the inevitable winner? A gamble to see how long it could be extended and how much accomplished in the time so won.
But Dumarest had had enough of childish games.
To win. To beat her to her knees. To make her surrender her will and then to discover how to lead them both from the Tau. One way to escape, perhaps, the other he preferred not to think about.